Data monitoring web services in a virtual lab environment

Abstract

Environmental issues have become of prime concern due to dramatic increase in the pollution levels in all parts of the world. Underlying aquifer flow in environmentally sensitive places plays an important role in characterizing the environmental condition of the place. There is thus a pressing need for monitoring and real time analysis of hydrological data over areas of environmental interest. Coupling the emerging sensing and wireless technologies with an internet infrastructure can enable efficient data monitoring and real-time analysis of environmental conditions over an area of interest. Information gathered from various data sources regarding the change in water level and quality during various seasons can then be used to characterize trends in the physical, chemical and biological condition of the environment. Efficient real-time monitoring furnished with fast data rendering and decision-making capabilities can go a long way in monitoring Civil and Environmental Engineering infrastructure. The speed and reliability necessary for such a task can be achieved only by using a distributed infrastructure, with dedicated resources to data acquisition, archival and rendering. Distributed development technologies like DCOM, CORBA, RMI and SOAP, essentially extensions of simple RPC protocols, provide the interconnectivity between different components of such a distributed infrastructure. The present work discusses these distributed development technologies and compares them in the context of the Smartwells project.